Website Plagiarism and Content Jacking

Content is King! The old wisdom of search engine optimization is more valid today than ever before. PlagAware helps you create and maintain high quality unique content with professional tools for duplicate content analysis and plagiarism management.

What is Content Jacking?

The term content jacking describes - just as colloquial as accurate - the growing popularity and the gaining bad habit of copying content in form of text, graphics and photos without the knowledge or approval of the site owner and presenting it the own content. Even if the expression "bad habit" suggests itself: Content jacking is not a trivial offense: The content, also the content of a website, is generally protected by copyright, so that one can take legal actions against content jacking.

Besides content jacking, even complete web presences are often copied, thus in a way the "look & feel" of a web site. Surprisingly this form of plagiarism does not necessarily present a copyright violation according to general legal opinion, since websites generally do not reach the necessary threshold of originality. You can find more information about this on this site Information about copyrights.

Content Jacking - So What?

Plagiarism and copies of websites present a special threat to the web, because the information and content are offered redundantly.

Content of websites are often copied and lightly modified ("copy, paste & modify"), whereby defaced meaning phrases often develop. The originator of the particular content is no longer traceable, whereby the quality of the presented information can no longer be checked.

Plagiarism and Copies Endanger Your Ranking in Search Engines

Search engines rank the text, the so-called content of a website. The more and higher quality content a website has, generally the better will it rank in the search results.

The content quality of a website will be measured by a search engine on how many other websites also have the same content amongst other things. Although a standalone position is optimal, 100% copy of your own website is fatal: Search engines assess that often as a so-called "Duplicate Content", which can lead to the exclusion of both websites from the search engine index. Which site will be excluded can depend on the so-called link popularity, also the amount and relevance of those sites, which are pointing to these corresponding websites.

You are losing visitors to operators of plagiarism sites.

The webmaster of the copied website is your competitor - otherwise he wouldn't have any interest in your content. Even if not the "biggest growing accident" occurs - the banning of your site from the index of one of the biggest search engine - that way you still provide your competitor unintentionally a competitive advantage: The efforts that you have invested and invest in the creating the content your competitor can put into marketing activities - and with that they do not seldom achieve a better search engine ranking than you do.That means immediately (clearly) less visitors on your website and with that losses of marketing your content.

By the way, you can count on it that copies and plagiarism will always be produced by multiple different websites, which the corresponding webmasters "cherry pick" and use for themselves. With that continuously increases the danger that you lose search engine hits to your copying competitor.